The New York Times editorial board should retract and resign
"A classic example Examples are what I was asking for, you know the context is correct, you said both sides attack teachers. You produced nothing, only a deflection. Now cough up some examples to illustrate your bothsideism post or retract it. "
The First Amendment asserts a right to free speech. It does not assert a right to not be criticized for speech. In fact, it protects critical speech.
And the protection is against government action, not against other people.
So it is beyond shocking to see this atop a New York Times editorial:
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
There is so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to start.
The fundamental right is to be able to engage in spirited debate without government intervention. There is no right not to be ratioed on Twitter.
The forum they host is one of the most influential in the world. If they really believe that people have a right to voice their opinions without fear of being shamed, they should all resign.
How the Times editorial board ended up here is incomprehensible, but one key factor was clearly a succumbing to the “woke panic” that has addled the minds of so many other effete writers such that they see threats from an “illiberal left” as existential — even compared to actual, official censorship and the increasingly likely prospect of an authoritarian, anti-democratic Republican Party seizing and holding control of the U.S. government.
It comes, of course, on the heels of the Times’s publication of an infuriatingly misleading guest essay .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/campus-speech-cancel-culture.html .. on March 7, in which the author (and the Times, by publishing it) confused “cancel culture” with being held accountable ..
[Insert outage: When Railing Against Cancel Culture Is About Railing Against Accountability A speech by Andrew Cuomo and an article by a college student suggest what’s really behind the lamentations about “left-wing censorship.” By Elie MystalTwitter March 9, 2022] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cuomo-camp-canceled-not/ .
Another factor is the malignant spread of the Timesian drive to appear “above the fray” and avoid “taking sides” – even when the two sides exist in gross asymmetry. The editorial board used to embrace consistently liberal values. These days it seems to delight in trolling the libs instead. Both-sidesism has jumped the “wall” between the political news desk and the opinion side, leading the editorial board to create false equivalencies unsupported by reality. Case in point:
Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.
Failing to acknowledge something very abstract is equated to active government censorship. Such twaddle.
Yes, but an overwhelming 76 percent said Americans enjoy freedom of speech completely or somewhat (with “somewhat” being the most common answer to this and other ambiguously phrased questions.) That’s hardly the same as “knowing” that “cancel culture” exist.
And what is “free speech”? The Times editorial eventually considers it “worth noting” that there is an “important distinction between what the First Amendment protects — freedom from government restrictions on expression — and the popular conception of free speech — the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent.”
But the former is clearly defined, and a right. The latter is neither.
The whole poll is worth reading, to show how intent the Times was on proving its point, and how ineptly it went about it. A whole series of questions, for instance, appears under this confusing prompt:
Consider each of the following examples of speech. While the Constitution protects them, tell me whether you think most people that you know support or oppose a person’s right to engage in that speech.
Examples included “Using social media platforms to call other people insulting names rather than stating disagreement with their views.” Two out of three people said “most people you know oppose” the right to do that.
This is meaningless stuff.
At heart, the questions raised by the editorial are:
* Is it OK for people to harshly criticize some ideas? * Is it always bad when people self-censor themselves?
The answer to No. 1 is yes. Criticism is essential to the functioning of our public sphere. It’s true that the attention economy reward assholery, and that some criticism is harsher than it probably should be. But that’s no reason to assert a made-up right not to be mocked.
And answer to No. 2. is no. Certain views that most of us would consider odious – born of racism, misogyny, or homophobia, for starters — are held by a surprising number of Americans, and I look back fondly on the days when more of them felt they needed to shut up about it.
Many of the odious views that were in remission in this country for several decades, at least as far as public expression goes, were successfully cultivated and amplified by Donald Trump and the leadership of the GOP over the past six years. Just about the only thing Republican candidates stand for these days are banning discussions of racism in public schools and discouraging Black and brown people from voting.
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